The Horse Adjutant

The Horse Adjutant

Auschwitz II - Birkenau Front Gate

way to survive was through work. I was being weakened, steadily underfed, and lacking any way to help myself. It was hard to avoid being beaten for the slightest infraction. My chances of survival were shrinking. I started to consider how to evade the electric fence. A small glimmer of hope opened as they selected me to help build a railroad. Maybe this would be a permanent job. I was tasked among hundreds of men to move stones. The purpose was to build up the land to support the heavy rails for the train. The train they were building pointed directly to the gas chambers. They were working on a faster way to kill people. I could not think about the purpose. Nothing made sense except the next step and the guards yelling. We had to walk 2 km with these heavy rocks, bring them to where they were needed to be, then return for more, no stopping, no standing, endless, mindless, work, a long line of men toiling. I worked hard. Soon, I was tasked with carrying the rail. Being the tallest, it seemed, almost the whole weight rested on me. I was now a slave laborer in an extermination factory. One day while doing this work I saw a Pullman train with 15 cars full of people slowly approach the dreaded end of the line. It was a real train with regular seating, not a cattle car, how I arrived. It was filled with nicely dressed Germans. They must have seen me, too. I was among the hundreds of men they saw while looking out the windows moving rocks. I must have been less than 100 feet from their train. I was so close. I could see their eyes and they saw me, too, toiling. They disappeared and were never seen again.

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